Remembering Hiroshima

We are 67 years on and yet the agony of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki still seer through everybody’s hearts. On 6th August 1945, as World War II was drawing its final, terrible breaths, US Colonel Paul Tibbets took off in the aircraft Enola Gay, named after his mother Enola Gay Tibbets, to become the first pilot to drop a cataclysmic atomic bomb. The effect of this momentous instant has left deep scars in the history of humanity, with the death toll of the two bombings possibly totalling 200,000 innocent souls.

Clifton Truman Daniels, Grandson of the US President Harry Truman, who initiated the bombings, was present at the memorial ceremony where tens of thousands of people paid their respects to the victims with a one minute silence at 08:15 local time, the moment when the bomb was dropped that killed 140,000 people. Mr Truman said that it was important for his family to understand the consequences of his Grandfather’s decisions. Japan’s Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, echoed this point, expressing how he believed the lessons of Hiroshima must never be forgotten.

Learning from the past

Throughout history, people have made mistakes. The only positive outcome one can recover from horrific faults in humanity such as Hiroshima is to learn from them.

The same thing can be said for other events in our history that can sometimes be easier to try to forget. BBC TWO’s recent documentary, ‘Hitler’s Children’, focussed on what life has been like for the descendents of some of the most powerful figures in the Nazi regime. They have had to deal with the horror associated with their name and their ancestors, and all they have been able to do is move forward and make sure that nobody ever makes the same mistake again.

Although war has never gone away, mercifully the atomic bombings of 1945 were the first and last the world has ever had to bear. For the future we can pray for newspapers that don’t carry the harrowing headlines of young, dead troops, and we can dream of a place where atomic bombs are unheard of. However, for now we must face these demons of humanity and not hide them from our thoughts. Remembering is the first step to finding the solution.

After losing his left arm and both legs to an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) in 2011, humanitarian photographer Giles Duley later returned to Afghanistan, documenting everything in the devastatingly honest…